Show me a better text format for serializing

onlinepersona@programming.dev to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 106 points –
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And I'll show you YAML

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JSON would be perfect if it allowed for comments. But it doesn't and that alone is enough for me to prefer YAML over JSON. Yes, JSON is understandable without any learning curve, but having a learning curve is not always bad. YAML provides a major benefit that is worth the learning curve and doesn't have the issues that XML has (which is that there is no way to understand an XML without also having the XSD for it)

Json should also allow for trailing commas. There's no reason for it not too. It's annoying having to maintain commas.

And also a standard date time type!

What is wrong with ISO 6801 strings?

11-2023-14

I dunno it just kinda looks weird to me

Dunno what format you've got there, but ISO 6801 looks like 2023-11-15T18:28:31Z

JSON5 has comments, among fixing a few other shortsighted limitations of the original.

If a comment isn't part of the semantic content of a JSON object it has no business being there. JSON models data, it's not markup language for writing config files.

You can use comments in JSON schema (in a standardized way) when they are semantically relevant: https://json-schema.org/understanding-json-schema/reference/comments

For the data interchange format, comments aren't part of the JSON grammar but the option to parse non-JSON values is left open to the implementation. Many implementations do detect (and ignore) comments indicated by e.g. # or //.

JSON models data, it’s not markup language for writing config files.

JavaScript package management promptly said otherwise. JSON is a config format no matter if you like it or not.

I've disagreed with JavaScript before, what makes you think I won't do it again?

Anyway, anything using JSON as a config language will also certainly use a JSON interpreter that can ignore comments. Sure that's "implementation specific," but so is a config file. You wouldn't use "MyApplication.config.json" outside the context of MyApplication loading its own configuration, so there's no need for it to be strictly compliant JSON as long as it plays nicely with most text editors.